Sunday, February 3, 2008

Here's a two for one, fellas - an EP from 2004, Periphery, and a mini-album from 2007, Automatic Writing, both released on the same label, Zabel Muziek, by Sennen, a four-piece instrumental post-rock band from The Netherlands. I'm going to start off with the most recent release and work my way backwards, since that's the order in which I discovered the band. In Automatic Writing, the band employs pretty complex rhythms at times switching between 3/4 beat to 5/4 and unexpectedly back to standard 4/4, and it makes the guitar and trumpet melodies, which effortlessly blend and glide in their own universe that much more interesting. The naming of the album, as well as its flow, imply a creative process in which the writer records his thoughts and feelings with the stream of consciousness. And it's an absolute pleasure to be on the receptive end. When purchasing the mini-album directly from the band [which, by the way, is available for free under the "creative commons" license], I couldn't help but grab their earlier EP (it was an easy sell for only €10 for both). Periphery, on the other hand, feels like a totally different album: it's opening, for example, is a slow build up of a rhythmic march along the paced strummed melody and a reverbed multi-layered tremolo picked guitar... until it all explodes. The three tracks work very well as one intelligently designed piece, and the EP does not disappoint one bit, even as an earlier production. I end up always listening to both in succession, and I recommend you do the same.